President Bush is scheduled this morning to visit New York City, where he will give a speech about the economy while standing on ground once trod by Washington and Hamilton, who believed in the economic principles on which Mr. Bush has staked his presidency. Mr. Bush has much of which to be proud. Asked what country is the biggest exporter in the world, lots of people would probably guess China or Japan. Not so — as Mr. Bush said yesterday, America is the largest exporter in the world. Or, as the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, Edward Lazear, who is on leave as a professor of economics at Stanford, put it, “The American economy is very strong right now. The unemployment rate is down to 4.5%, which is not only low by historic standards, but a rate that many economists consider to be full employment. Real wages grew last year at a pace that exceeded that of the late ’90s, and inflation is in the mid 2% range. Last year saw exports grow at 13% while imports only grew at 5%, and our trade deficit came down as a result.”

New York is a fine place for Mr. Bush to make these sorts of points, because the prosperity is on full display here in record bonuses at Wall Street firms, record prices for Manhattan real estate, a boom in new housing and office construction, and overflowing coffers of the city treasury. For all the gloomy talk about the upstate New York economy, statewide the unemployment rate in December 2006, the most recent date for which statistics are available, was 3.8%. That’s startlingly low, lower than at any time during the Clinton presidency. Given all the doom-saying there has been from local Democrats in respect of Mr. Bush’s economic policies, this is remarkable.

The doom-saying, by the way, has been from not only local Democrats. A friend sent us over yesterday a copy of “An Open Letter to President George W. Bush” that was issued two years ago by a gaggle of professors associated with some of our finest business schools. They issued their open letter because, they claimed, they were “concerned that U.S. economic policy has taken a dangerous turn under your stewardship.” They claimed the data made clear that “your policy of slashing taxes — primarily for those at the upper reaches of the income distribution — has not worked.”

It turns out that nearly every fear they cited, from the ballooning deficit to inflation, has proved to be so wrong that it’s a wonder anyone ever signs up for the business schools where they teach. There are plenty of reasons for all the numbers behind the Bush Boom, and not all of them have to do with President Bush. But certainly Mr. Bush can take some of the credit for preventing another terrorist attack on America by taking the battle to enemy soil, and for tax cuts on income, dividends, and capital gains that have allowed the economy to hum along without a lot of government sand in the gears.

Mr. Bush, in any event, has an opportunity today to press for policy changes — permanently extending the tax cuts, reforming the civil litigation system, rolling back some of the excesses of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation — that will keep the Bush Boom going. He also has an opportunity to do this on a bipartisan basis, given the remarkable convergence of Senator Schumer, Mayor Bloomberg, and Governor Spitzer on matters related to regulatory changes that will be needed to protect New York’s standing as a financial center. It’s an important moment.